Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  I must concentrate. When I pass this spot again on the way back, I’ll have to know what I’m going to do. He sat down in the shade under the cabin porch. There were only three possibilities. One consisted in presenting nothing at all. No text. No session. That would be a declaration of bankruptcy, which would also alienate the others, because it would come unheralded and without a request for understanding. He had missed that. On the contrary, when asking Millar for information about English words, he had inevitably created the impression of working on a paper. It would be a sudden, speechless bankruptcy, without explanation on his part and without understanding from the others, an abyss of mute embarrassment. And that possibility struck Perlmann as completely unbearable, when he considered how he could announce it. He couldn’t simply put a piece of paper in his colleagues’ pigeonholes telling them aridly that he would not be providing a contribution, that the sessions assigned to the purpose had been cancelled. Should he add: because with the best will in the world I haven’t been able to think of anything? They would demand an explanation, either explicitly or through their silence. Or should he admit complete failure over dinner, tap his glass and then, with words upon which the very situation would bestow a dreadful and involuntary solemnity, explain that unfortunately he had absolutely nothing more to say in academic terms? Should he perhaps visit the individual colleagues in their rooms and tell them of his incapacity, six times in a row and then a seventh time on the phone to Angelini, who was so keen to come to his session? Perlmann got a dry mouth and walked quickly back to the bow to let the airstream dispel that thought.

  A local family with two children was coming forwards from the rear of the ship. The children threw a ball to each other, and suddenly the peace up here at the front, where only a few tourists had been standing at the railing taking photographs, was over. By the violence of his blazing irritation Perlmann could tell how far off-kilter he was. When the boy missed the ball, which flew overboard, he started screaming as if he were being burned at the stake; his parents could do nothing to calm him down, and Perlmann had to control himself to keep from yelling at him and shaking him till he stopped. He fled to the stern of the ship, but the screaming was even audible there, and the roar of the engine made clear thinking impossible. At last he went to the cabin and drank a lukewarm coffee at the bar.

  He could – this was the next possibility – present his notes on language and experience as his contribution. He would have to call Maria from Genoa and ask her to have the paper ready by today, tomorrow lunchtime at the very latest. He could tell her what had happened with Silvestri. And ask her to cross out the heading mestre non è brutta – as the title of a paper that was already extremely questionable, it was an additional and unnecessary provocation.

  He went through once more the sentences he had looked at on Monday night; some of them he read out under his voice. This morning he liked them; they struck him as apt and seemed to capture something important that one might easily fail to notice. They were unassuming, precise sentences, he thought. For a while their calm style merged with the peace of the gleaming surface of the water far out, and it didn’t seem impossible to him to approach the others with these sentences. But then a tottering old man bumped into him and knocked him against the bar, and suddenly Perlmann’s sense of security and the confidence that he had felt in his words just a moment before collapsed all around him. Now they struck him as being as treacherous as mirages, or the wishful thinking one has while half-asleep, and as he poured his slopped coffee from the saucer back into the cup, he said to himself with apprehensive sobriety that this solution was also unthinkable. Quite apart from the fact that it was not a coherent paper, these strange notes would be mocked as impressionistic and anecdotal, as unverifiable, often inconsistent, full of contradictions, in short, as unscientific. The paper would leave people like Millar and Ruge speechless. They saw only the possibility of irony. The most charitable thing would be for them to maintain an expressive silence.

  That Perlmann would be left standing there as someone who had abandoned academia, and could henceforth not be relied upon, and that now, of all times, when he had received the prize and the invitation to Princeton was approaching – that wasn’t the worst thing about this possibility. What made the thought entirely unbearable was the fact that these notes were far too intimate, and laid him bare before anyone who read them. They had seemed so intimate to him that he had felt more at ease using a foreign language as a protection even from himself. To someone with English as a mother tongue – Millar, for example – that distance did not apply. Perlmann shuddered. And then, suddenly, he had a sense that he understood his dread about his own sentences better than before: many of the notes showed him as a shy and vulnerable child wrestling with experiences it had not understood.

  If he presented nothing at all, that would in itself reveal something he would have preferred to keep silent. But it remained global and abstract. It was the confession of an incapacity that remained otherwise in darkness. What he thought and experienced behind it remained unclear, unfamiliar. It was up to him to hide himself away from further insights. His notes, on the other hand, were, it seemed to him, like a window through which one could see right into his innermost depths. To let the others read them would mean obliterating all the boundaries that he had so painstakingly constructed, and it seemed to Perlmann that there was barely any difference between this process and complete annihilation.

  The air in the ship’s cabin was so thick that it could have been cut with a knife, and Perlmann felt he was suffocating on his own smoke. He stubbed out his cigarette and went quickly outside. He performed a complete tour of the ship, his eyes seeking something that might hold his attention for a moment, for just a few moments which would mean his last small respite, a last opportunity to catch his breath for what was about to come.

  He was glad when an elderly, dwarfish man asked him for a light. For a moment he was tempted to escape into a conversation with him, but then he was repelled by the man’s permanently open mouth with its swelling, protruding tongue. Perlmann pulled his face into a painful smile and walked back to the front, where he stepped up slowly, almost in slow motion, to the railing, supporting himself on outstretched arms and closed his eyes.

  The third possibility was one that he had not, until that moment, dared to capture in an explicit thought. Hitherto it had been present to him only in the form of a dark, impenetrable sensation, from which he had turned hastily away whenever it had appeared on the edge of his consciousness. Because it was a sensation – he felt that very clearly whenever it touched him – that emanated a terrible sense of menace, and merely to pursue its precise content was a sense of danger. And so it seemed to him a tremendous effort. It was a summoning of courage that he thought he felt physically now that he looked this possibility in the face for the first time: the possibility of presenting the translation of Leskov’s text as his own.

  It was as if a treacherous poison were spreading through him when he allowed this desperate thought to unfold before him in all its clarity. It hurt to experience himself as someone who could in all seriousness consider such a thought. It was a dry pain, free of self-pity, and all the more horrific for that reason. What happened there, he sensed with an alertness in which all self-reassurance burned away, was a deep incision in his life, an irrevocable, incurable break with the past and the start of a new computation of time.

  None of his colleagues would be able to discover the deception, even if the Russian text were by some improbable coincidence to fall into their hands. For them a Russian text was nothing more than a closed typeface, an ornament. And besides, none of them knew Leskov. No one knew his address. All they had heard was the name ‘St Petersburg’. And last of all, none of them had the slightest reason to make contact with this unknown, obscure Russian, who was a nobody in professional circles, and thus provoke the threat of discovery by Leskov himself. Later, if the works were to be published, Perlmann could withdraw the paper and re
place it with one of his own. If necessary he could also delay the printing. He would publish the volume. Aside from his own printout there would be only seven copies of the bogus text, and it would be respected when he expressly asked that the text should not be distributed further, as it was only the first, provisional version, an experiment. If they then heard nothing more about its further development, saw no further versions and instead read an entirely new text by him, the others would at last set the paper aside. It would be forgotten, and grow yellow and dusty on a shelf or in a cupboard, until eventually it fell victim to a clearing operation like the one that everyone undertook sooner or later in their own flood of paper, and was destroyed.

  So he could risk it. And from the point of view of scholarly esteem he would be in a much better position than in the two other cases. Admittedly, Leskov’s text was wayward and in some places bold; one could even call it eccentric. But in the discussion Perlmann could refer to the literature of memory research which had not been accessible to Leskov himself, and one could also characterize the paper as a conceptual one, a broad-brushstroke outline, and thus basically precisely appropriate to this occasion. Millar and Ruge, this was fairly clear, would screw up their noses at so much speculation. But it was certainly possible that the others would find the text interesting. That much was certainly true of Evelyn Mistral. But even a man like von Levetzov had recently taken notice of the subject. Perlmann, it might appear, was trying something new, something that perhaps was no longer linguistics, but which was imaginative and provocative. Something was happening, developing in Perlmann’s work, and secretly they might even be a bit envious of his courage.

  Perlmann felt ill, and he threw the cigarette he had just lit into the water. He was relieved that they were now entering Genoa harbor and there were some things to look at: the crew throwing the ropes, the steaming water spraying from the bow and, further away, the big ships and the cranes whose arms glided over the tall stacks of colorful containers. When the family from before was suddenly standing next to him and the children were loudly calling out the things they could see, Perlmann wasn’t bothered, quite the contrary. He fled his thoughts and wished he could step outside his innermost depths and lose himself in things, dissolve himself entirely in the stones of the quay wall, in the wooden poles against which the ship was rubbing, in the cobbles of the street, in all the things that were simply just there and entire unto themselves.

  There was nothing to keep him on dry land. The lack of any rocking movement gave him a feeling of imprisonment, even though he had the chance of going wherever he wanted in this city on the slope, which in the noon autumn light had something about it of a desert city, something oriental. The ship didn’t get back until a quarter past three, but there was a tour of the harbor every hour, and the people for the one o’clock trip were just boarding. Perlmann was glad that it was late in the year and the two seats next to him were free. When he let his arm dangle over the side, he could almost touch the dark green, almost black water. Pools of oil and rubbish drifted past, at the clearer spots one could make out seaweed, and sometimes a rusty chain used to moor a ship.

  He gave a start when the loudspeaker was turned on with a click, and an unnecessarily loud woman’s voice greeted the passengers, first in Italian, then in English, German, French and Spanish and at last in a language that must have been Japanese. It was idiotic, but he hadn’t thought about that, as if he were on a sightseeing boat for the first time in his life. It was going to be an hour of torture: all that information, all those explanations that interested him not in the slightest, and everything in six languages. And he urgently needed to think. Peace and concentration had never been as important as they were now.

  The voice from the loudspeaker, shrill and bored, began with details about the size of the harbor and the volume of its goods shipments, then a tape played the same information in the other languages, all women’s voices, only the Spanish text was spoken by a man. Perlmann covered his ears, the repetitions were unbearable. That he had been so stupid as to take this trip struck him as a sign that there was no way out of his plight. It was like a harbinger of inescapable doom.

  They passed by the first big ships, their curved, black bows loomed far into the air, lifeboats were fastened along the railings, and single sailors waved. Hidden behind another vessel, a black ship’s wall suddenly appeared, bearing the word leningrad in white, Cyrillic script. Perlmann turned hot and cold. He gulped and felt everything convulsing inside him. At that moment he desperately wished the letters were completely alien to him, just white lines that provided nothing to read and nothing to understand. That they were so familiar and self-evident to him was a source of unhappiness; the actual reason, it seemed to him, for his desperate situation.

  Agnes, he was quite sure, would have advised him to take the first path. Of course, she would have understood that it was unpleasant for him; but she would have seen the whole thing in far less dramatic terms than he did. It was, she might have said, as if she had had to tell the agency: ‘Sorry, but over the past few weeks I haven’t come up with any usable shots.’ That was all, a temporary crisis, no reason to speak of a loss of face.

  But Agnes had worked for an agency in which everyone was very cooperative, almost chummy. She hadn’t known the academic world, with its atmosphere of competition and mutual suspicion, she had just known it from his stories, and there had often been a bad atmosphere between them when he thought he sensed she was mutely reproaching him for an excessive and disproportionate sensitivity in such matters.

  The trip now continued along the quay where the big freighters lay. Between the individual ships one could see the long row of trucks that picked up the goods. This was where the freight was discharged. Discharged, he thought to himself, and for a moment he stopped resisting the loudspeaker and concentrated instead on the vocabulary of harbors and ships. He lost himself entirely in the shrill Italian voice and then the others, the taped voices with their sterile tones which, it seemed to him, had not the slightest thing to do with the colorful backdrop outside.

  Without really noticing, he began translating from one language to another in his mind. At first he tested how well he could keep up when he translated into German. It became increasingly clear to him that it was a matter of keeping a very particular balance of concentration. One had to look back at the sentence that had just come to an end, and could only begin to form the German sentence when the point of syntactical clarity had been reached in the foreign sentence – no earlier, because otherwise one could find oneself starting on the wrong foot, and end up stumbling. That meant that you inevitably concluded the German sentence after a certain time lag, with a powerful need to put it behind you to have your head free for the next one. So in the second half of the sentence you automatically speeded up, exploiting the routine and self-evidence with which your mother tongue was available to you. That phase could barely hold the attention, because it already had to be deployed entirely upon the new sentence. During that second it was a tightrope act, from which one could fall either of two ways. First of all, it could happen that you had to think for a moment too long about the old sentence, perhaps even that an unfamiliar word would put you in a panic; then you started too late into the process in which you should have been constructing your trained expectations concerning the new sentence, and had to admit that you had missed the new sentence. Or else you were pursued by the fear that that was precisely what could happen; then you risked the danger of letting your eye dart just a bit too far forward, even before the German version of the old sentence had found the point at which it sounded most natural and could be left up to the unconscious concluding process, so then you couldn’t conclude the old sentence. The worst case was a combination of the two. Then a kind of paralysis set in: you sensed that you should actually take a quick look back to finish the old sentence correctly, but it was plain that you had arrived too late for the new sentence. You didn’t know which was more important, and that doubt mean
t you lost time, and then you lost control of both sentences, the old one and the new one, and you had to shake off your irritation with your own failure very quickly to catch up with the next sequence of sentences.

  That seemed to Perlmann to be the hardest thing: not to succumb to irritation over occasional and inevitable errors. Part of the training of an interpreter, he thought, would be to show no irritation, to reach in a flash and unemotionally the decision that the current sentence was beyond saving, a normal breakdown that should be forgotten straight away. Above all it was a matter of confidence: the certainty that one could depend completely upon one’s capacity for concentration. And as long as one maintained and experienced that difficult balance, remaining master of the situation, it was a wonderful feeling that could be quite intoxicating. That feeling would intensify still further, he thought, if one were capable of translating between two foreign languages, two that were as exotic as possible, far removed from the natural self-evidence of one’s mother tongue. A diversity in the languages you had mastered, that was freedom, and being able to push your own boundaries far out into the realm of the exotic, that must be a massive intensification of the sense of life, a real rush of freedom.

  Perlmann now tried to leap back and forth between the foreign languages that came out of the loudspeaker, and each time he did so he felt clumsy and stupid as he collided against Japanese as if against an impenetrable wall. Then the particular pitch and brightness of the Japanese voice sounded as if the woman were mocking his incomprehension. He liked being able to make the whole effort on the quiet, involving himself only internally, to some extent, without the sound that came when you engaged with the world by speaking. And during a pause from the loudspeaker, when the only sound was the quiet rushing of the water and the puttering of the engine, he knew all of a sudden what he could have been: a long-distance runner through all the languages of the world, with lots of empty space around him, and without the obligation to exchange a single word with people.